I Survived Codebits 2014

I’m still recovering, actually. Two nights’ worth of “proper” sleep isn’t enough to catch up on six days running about inside the venue setting stuff up, fixing things and manning the consoles, and I still feel tired and somewhat woozy.

And, ironically, I ended up spending Sunday with the kids at the Science Museum, which is within walking distance from the venue. Meta-ironically, they had spent the week in the neighborhood doing Easter break activities and wanted to do them again with me.

So I spent yet another (half) day running about after them, and ended up dozing off on the couch while poking despondently at Twitter, with nary a coherent thought in my head.

Anyway, there’s still a lot to be done post-event – for instance, I just ground my teeth, sipped some coffee and open sourced the client app I hacked together during the past couple of weekends (best to get that out ASAP, since the server needs some cleaning up still), and grabbed all the media I had and tossed it into a Flickr set before I forgot what was what.

Sadly, I had pretty much zero time for photography this year, and all I have are crummy shots from the (which sucks for taking photos in that kind of lighting). But there are some awesome galleries out there that I’ll link to later.

Anyway, here’s my top 5 list of highlights from this year:

  • Played the game built by The Arcade Man. Yes, the Oculus Rift is the future. Go and read Ready Player One now while you’re at it.
  • Met Christian Heilmann (one of the few talks I actually managed to attend, and even then while pushing out announcements from my laptop) and had a longish chat with him about a number of fascinating things.
  • Caught up with old friends who came back to Portugal just for the event.
  • Had a blast at the Quiz Show watching Bruno and Basílio troll our QuizMaster.
  • Was very happy to see Basílio’s team win the Grand Prize with a completely off-the-wall, amazingly ingenious project.

There’s more, but that’ll be all for now – I need to unwind a bit and do some non-computer-related stuff for a change. But the bottom line is that I feel tired but quite happy.

It was grand. And it was, indeed, the best Codebits ever.

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